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Topic: Idea - Chaos Rift (Read 212 times)

In the last couple of weeks I’ve been adding support for instances in Arctic. Similar to most MMOs, instances are multiple copies of the same zone / quest that many groups can run in parallel, independent from each other.

I don’t know if instances will ever support all the features of our normal zones, but they’re now reaching a point where we can start playing around and try some ideas. Here’s the first one I’m considering, let me know your thoughts.

Create a permanent Chaos Rift in a fixed room (eg near Neraka). Players can enter the Chaos Rift to venture into the abyssal planes and kill the bosses.

The Chaos Rift leads to an 1-room instance. This will be the staging room for all further exploration. Each group will use its own instance. The way instances will work, grouped players will join the instance rift, until the instance is full (probably same limit as group, but can tweak).

The staging room is safe and can be used for prep. It includes a portal to the abyssal planes. The abyssal planes are instances, which in the first version of this feature can be automatically generated maze picking some random rooms from a predefined list. In later phases this can be either standard zonelets, or some themed zonelets that rotate each day, etc.

If the abyssal planes reset, players, corpses etc will be transferred to the staging room for that group.

Each abyssal plane will have some fodder monsters and a rift boss.

There are 100 levels of abyssal planes. The players can select which level to enter from the staging room. Mobs in the abyssal planes scale with the level of the plane.

Players in the abyssal planes suffer a permanent debuff (e.g. chaotic weakness) equal to the level of the plane. The debuf will be debilitating enough to prevent the players from completing higher level planes without a way to mitigate it.

Among normal loot, rift bosses will drop some chaos shard that will be used as an alchemy component, in the same way motes are today. People will be able to purchase sigils to resist chaotic weakness and negate the debuff. The sigils can have very cheap affinity / motes requirement, so that farming the rifts will be the main requirement for rift progression (other than being able to fight the scaled mobs ofc).

Some ideas for other rift boss loot (other than normal eq and chaos shards)

Set items. Maybe a standard piece per level bracket. For example 1-10 will drop feet, 11-20 will drop legs, etc. 1 random class drop per run. Can be disenchanted if not needed.

Special items with fixed affinity that can be enchanted with motes but cannot gain more affinity.

" The way instances will work, grouped players will join the instance rift, until the instance is full (probably same limit as group, but can tweak)."

As a mostly solo player, I don't agree with this part. If I want to challenge myself and go in with just my two guys I think this should be addressed. But overall this sounds awesome!

To clarify, people in the same group will be able to join the same instance until the instance is full. If the instance is full, or if people are not in the same group as the players in the instance, they'll join a new one.